CLASS VI

I made two more classes, VII and VIII, but they entered into anatomical details impossible of discussion in a book designed to be read aloud at the domestic hearth. Perhaps I shall print them in the Medical Times at some future time. As my classes stand, they present mysteries enough. Why should the bronchial tubes (Class II) be so much lordlier than the lungs (Class III) to which they lead? And why should the œsophagus (Class VI) be so much less lordly than the stomach (Class II in the United States, Class IV in England) to which it leads? And yet the fact in each case is known to us all. To have a touch of bronchitis is almost fashionable; to have pneumonia is merely bad luck. The stomach, at least in America, is so respectable that it dignifies even seasickness, but I have never heard of any decent man who ever had any trouble with his œsophagus.

If you wish a short cut to a strange organ’s standing, study its diseases. Generally speaking, they are sure indices. Let us imagine a problem: What is the relative respectability of the hair and the scalp, close neighbors, offspring of the same osseous tissue? Turn to baldness and dandruff, and you have your answer. To be bald is no more than a genial jocosity, a harmless foible—but to have dandruff is almost as bad as to have beri-beri. Hence the fact that the hair is in Class I, while the scalp is at the bottom of Class V. So again and again. To break one’s collar-bone (Class II) is to be in harmony with the nobility and gentry; to crack one’s shin (Class IV) is merely vulgar. And what a difference between having one’s tonsils cut out (Class II) and getting a new set of false teeth (Class V)!

Wherefore? Why? To what end? Why is the stomach so much more respectable (even in England) than the spleen; the liver (even in America) than the pancreas; the windpipe than the œsophagus; the pleura than the diaphragm? Why is the collar-bone the undisputed king of the osseous frame? One can understand the supremacy of the heart: it plainly bosses the whole vascular system. But why do the bronchial tubes wag the lungs? Why is the chin superior to the nose? The ankles to the shins? The solar plexus to the gall-bladder?

I am unequal to the penetration of this great ethical, æsthetical and sociological mystery. But in leaving it, let me point to another and antagonistic one: to wit, that which concerns those viscera of the lower animals that we use for food. The kidneys in man are far down the scale—far down in Class V, along with false teeth, the scalp and the female leg. But the kidneys of the beef steer, the calf, the sheep, or whatever animal it is whose kidneys we eat—the kidneys of this creature are close to the borders of Class I. What is it that young Capt. Lionel Basingstoke, M.P., always orders when he drops in at Gatti’s on his way from his chambers in the Albany to that flat in Tyburnia where Mrs. Vaughn-Grimsby is waiting for him to rescue her from her cochon of a husband? What else but deviled kidneys? Who ever heard of a gallant young English seducer who did’t eat deviled kidneys—not now and then, not only on Sundays and legal holidays, but every day, every evening?

Again, and by way of postscript No. 2, concentrate your mind upon sweetbreads. Sweetbreads are made in Chicago of the pancreases of horned cattle. From Portland to Portland they belong to the first class of refined delicatessen. And yet, on the human plane, the pancreas is in Class VI, along with the cæcum and the paunch. And, contrariwise, there is tripe—“the stomach of the ox or of some other ruminant.” The stomach of an American citizen belongs to Class II, and even the stomach of an Englishman is in Class IV, but tripe is far down in Class VIII. And chitterlings—the excised vermiform appendix of the cow. Of all the towns in Christendom, Richmond, Va., is the only one wherein a self-respecting white man would dare to be caught wolfing a chitterling in public.

XI.—THE JAZZ WEBSTER
XI. The Jazz Webster

Actor. One handicapped more by a wooden leg than by a wooden head.

Adultery. Democracy applied to love.

Alimony. The ransom that the happy pay to the devil.

Anti-Vivisectionist. One who gags at a guinea-pig and swallows a baby.

Archbishop. A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.

Argument. A means of persuasion. The agents of argumentation under a democracy, in the order of their potency, are (a) whiskey, (b) beer, (c) cigars, (d) tears.

Axiom. Something that everyone believes. When everyone begins to believe anything it ceases to be true. For example, the notion that the homeliest girl in the party is the safest.

Ballot Box. The altar of democracy. The cult served upon it is the worship of jackals by jackasses.

Brevity. The quality that makes cigarettes, speeches, love affairs and ocean voyages bearable.

Celebrity. One who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn’t know.

Chautauqua. A place in which persons who are not worth talking to listen to that which is not worth hearing.

Christian. One who believes that God notes the fall of a sparrow and is shocked half to death by the fall of a Sunday-school superintendent; one who is willing to serve three Gods, but draws the line at one wife.

Christian Science. The theory that, since the sky rockets following a wallop in the eye are optical delusions, the wallop itself is a delusion and the eye another.

Church. A place in which gentlemen who have never been to Heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.

Civilization. A concerted effort to remedy the blunders and check the practical joking of God.

Clergyman. A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.

Conscience. The inner voice which warns us that someone is looking.

Confidence. The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place.

Courtroom. A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with the betting odds in favor of Judas.

Creator. A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh. Three proofs of His humor: democracy, hay fever, any fat woman.

Democracy. The theory that two thieves will steal less than one, and three less than two, and four less than three, and so on ad infinitum; the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Epigram. A platitude with vine-leaves in its hair.

Eugenics. The theory that marriages should be made in the laboratory; the Wassermann test for love.

Evil. That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.

Experience. A series of failures. Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again next time.

Fame. An embalmer trembling with stage-fright.

Fine. A bribe paid by a rich man to escape the lawful penalty of his crime. In China such bribes are paid to the judge personally; in America they are paid to him as agent for the public. But it makes no difference to the men who pay them—nor to the men who can’t pay them.

Firmness. A form of stupidity; proof of an inability to think the same thing out twice.

Friendship. A mutual belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks, hobgoblins and imbecilities.

Gentleman. One who never strikes a woman without provocation; one on whose word of honor the betting odds are at least 1 to 2.

Happiness. Peace after effort, the overcoming of difficulties, the feeling of security and well-being. The only really happy folk are married women and single men.

Hell. A place where the Ten Commandments have a police force behind them.

Historian. An unsuccessful novelist.

Honeymoon. The time during which the bride believes the bridegroom’s word of honor.

Hope. A pathological belief in the occurrence of the impossible.

Humanitarian. One who would be sincerely sorry to see his neighbor’s children devoured by wolves.

Husband. One who played safe and is now played safely. A No. 16 neck in a No. 15½ collar.

Hygiene. Bacteriology made moral; the theory that the Italian in the ditch should be jailed for spitting on his hands.

Idealist. One who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

Immorality. The morality of those who are having a better time. You will never convince the average farmer’s mare that the late Maud S. was not dreadfully immoral.

Immortality. The condition of a dead man who doesn’t believe that he is dead.

Jealousy. The theory that some other fellow has just as little taste.

Judge. An officer appointed to mislead, restrain, hypnotize, cajole, seduce, browbeat, flabbergast and bamboozle a jury in such a manner that it will forget all the facts and give its decision to the best lawyer. The objection to judges is that they are seldom capable of a sound professional judgment of lawyers. The objection to lawyers is that the best are the worst.

Jury. A group of twelve men who, having lied to the judge about their hearing, health and business engagements, have failed to fool him.

Lawyer. One who protects us against robbers by taking away the temptation.

Liar. (a) One who pretends to be very good; (b) one who pretends to be very bad.

Love. The delusion that one woman differs from another.

Love-At-First-Sight. A labor-saving device.

Lover. An apprentice second husband; victim No. 2 in the larval stage.

Misogynist. A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.

Martyr. The husband of a woman with the martyr complex.

Morality. The theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99% of them are wrong.

Music-Lover. One who can tell you offhand how many sharps are in the key of C major.

Optimist. The sort of man who marries his sister’s best friend.

Osteopath. One who argues that all human ills are caused by the pressure of hard bone upon soft tissue. The proof of his theory is to be found in the heads of those who believe it.

Pastor. One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn’t pay.

Patriotism. A variety of hallucination which, if it seized a bacteriologist in his laboratory, would cause him to report the streptococcus pyogenes to be as large as a Newfoundland dog, as intelligent as Socrates, as beautiful as Mont Blanc and as respectable as a Yale professor.

Pensioner. A kept patriot.

Platitude. An idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.

Politician. Any citizen with influence enough to get his old mother a job as charwoman in the City Hall.

Popularity. The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.

Posterity. The penalty of a faulty technique.

Progress. The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.

Prohibitionist. The sort of man one wouldn’t care to drink with, even if he drank.

Psychologist. One who sticks pins into babies, and then makes a chart showing the ebb and flow of their yells.

Psychotherapy. The theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow, and is certainly a damned fool.

Quack. A physician who has decided to admit it.

Reformer. A hangman signing a petition against vivisection.

Remorse. Regret that one waited so long to do it.

Self-Respect. The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

Sob. A sound made by women, babies, tenors, fashionable clergymen, actors and drunken men.

Socialism. The theory that John Smith is better than his superiors.

Suicide. A belated acquiescence in the opinion of one’s wife’s relatives.

Sunday. A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.

Sunday School. A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

Surgeon. One bribed heavily by the patient to take the blame for the family doctor’s error in diagnosis.

Temptation. An irresistible force at work on a movable body.

Thanksgiving Day. A day devoted by persons with inflammatory rheumatism to thanking a loving Father that it is not hydrophobia.

Theology. An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms of the not worth knowing.

Tombstone. An ugly reminder of one who has been forgotten.

Truth. Something somehow discreditable to someone.

University. A place for elevating sons above the social rank of their fathers. In the great American universities men are ranked as follows: 1. Seducers; 2. Fullbacks; 3. Booze-fighters; 4. Pitchers and Catchers; 5. Poker players; 6. Scholars; 7. Christians.

Verdict. The a priori opinion of that juror who smokes the worst cigars.

Vers Libre. A device for making poetry easier to write and harder to read.

Wart. Something that outlasts ten thousand kisses.

Wealth. Any income that is at least $100 more a year than the income of one’s wife’s sister’s husband.

Wedding. A device for exciting envy in women and terror in men.

Wife. One who is sorry she did it, but would undoubtedly do it again.

Widower. One released on parole.

Woman. Before marriage, an agente provocateuse; after marriage, a gendarme.

Women’s Club. A place in which the validity of a philosophy is judged by the hat of its prophetess.

Yacht Club. An asylum for landsmen who would rather die of drink than be seasick.

XII.—THE OLD SUBJECT
XII.—The Old Subject

§ 1.

Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later. For another thing, they die earlier.

§ 2.

The man who marries for love alone is at least honest. But so was Czolgosz.

§ 3.

When a husband’s story is believed, he begins to suspect his wife.

§ 4.

In the year 1830 the average American had six children and one wife. How time transvalues all values!

§ 5.

Love begins like a triolet and ends like a college yell.

§ 6.

A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.

§ 7.

Man’s objection to love is that it dies hard; woman’s is that when it is dead it stays dead.

§ 8.

Definition of a good mother: one who loves her child almost as much as a little girl loves her doll.

§ 9.

The way to hold a husband is to keep him a little bit jealous. The way to lose him is to keep him a little bit more jealous.

§ 10.

It used to be thought in America that a woman ceased to be a lady the moment her name appeared in a newspaper. It is no longer thought so, but it is still true.

§ 11.

Women have simple tastes. They can get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.

§ 12.

Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner’s inquest.

§ 13.

How little it takes to make life unbearable!... A pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman’s laugh!

§ 14.

The bride at the altar: “At last! At last!” The bridegroom: “Too late! Too late!”

§ 15.

The best friend a woman can have is the man who has got over loving her. He would rather die than compromise her.

§ 16.

The one breathless passion of every woman is to get some one married. If she’s single, it’s herself. If she’s married, it’s the woman her husband would probably marry if she died tomorrow.

§ 17.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon. Woman, that she was born so long ago.

§ 18.

Woman is at once the serpent, the apple—and the belly-ache.

§ 19.

Cold mutton-stew; a soiled collar; breakfast in dress clothes; a wet house-dog, over-affectionate; the other fellow’s tooth-brush; an echo of “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay”; the damp, musty smell of an empty house; stale beer; a mangy fur coat; Katzenjammer; false teeth; the criticism of Hamilton Wright Mabie; boiled cabbage; a cocktail after dinner; an old cigar butt; ... the kiss of Evelyn after the inauguration of Eleanor.

§ 20.

Whenever a woman begins to talk of anything, she is talking to, of, or at a man.

§ 21.

The worst man hesitates when choosing a mother for his children. And hesitating, he is lost.

§ 22.

Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.

§ 23.

No man is ever too old to look at a woman, and no woman is ever too fat to hope that he will look.

§ 24.

Bachelors have consciences. Married men have wives.

§ 25.

Bachelors know more about women than married men. If they did’t they’d be married, too.

§ 26.

Man is a natural polygamist. He always has one woman leading him by the nose and another hanging on to his coat-tails.

§ 27.

All women, soon or late, are jealous of their daughters; all men, soon or late, are envious of their sons.

§ 28.

History seems to bear very harshly upon women. One cannot recall more than three famous women who were virtuous. But on turning to famous men the seeming injustice disappears. One would have difficulty finding even two of them who were virtuous.

§ 29.

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.

§ 30.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him in a very handy form.

§ 31.

The worst of marriage is that it makes a woman believe that all men are just as easy to fool.

§ 32.

The great secret of happiness in love is to be glad that the other fellow married her.

§ 33.

A man may be a fool and not know it—but not if he is married.

§ 34.

All men are proud of their own children. Some men carry egoism so far that they are even proud of their own wives.

§ 35.

When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.

§ 36.

Women do not like timid men. Cats do not like prudent rats.

§ 37.

He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.

§ 38.

A bachelor is one who wants a wife, but is glad he hasn’t got her.

§ 40.

Women usually enjoy annoying their husbands, but not when they annoy them by growing fat.

XIII.—PANORAMAS OF PEOPLE
XIII.—Panoramas of People

I.—Men

Fat, slick, round-faced men, of the sort who haunt barber shops and are always having their shoes shined. Tall, gloomy, Gothic men, with eyebrows that meet over their noses and bunches of black, curly hair in their ears. Men wearing diamond solitaires, fraternal order watchcharms, golden elks’ heads with rubies for eyes. Men with thick, loose lips and shifty eyes. Men smoking pale, spotted cigars. Men who do not know what to do with their hands when they talk to women. Honorable, upright, successful men who seduce their stenographers and are kind to their dear old mothers. Men who allow their wives to dress like chorus girls. White-faced, scared-looking, yellow-eyed men who belong to societies for the suppression of vice. Men who boast that they neither drink nor smoke. Men who mop their bald heads with perfumed handkerchiefs. Men with drawn, mottled faces, in the last stages of arterio-sclerosis. Silent, stupid-looking men in thick tweeds who tramp up and down the decks of ocean steamers. Men who peep out of hotel rooms at Swedish chambermaids. Men who go to church on Sunday morning, carrying Oxford Bibles under their arms. Men in dress coats too tight under the arms. Tea-drinking men. Loud, back-slapping men, gabbling endlessly about baseball players. Men who have never heard of Mozart. Tired business men with fat, glittering wives. Men who know what to do when children are sick. Men who believe that any woman who smokes is a prostitute. Yellow, diabetic men. Men whose veins are on the outside of their noses. Now and then a clean, clear-eyed, upstanding man. Once a week or so a man with good shoulders, straight legs and a hard, resolute mouth....

II.—Women

Fat women with flabby, double chins. Moon-faced, pop-eyed women in little flat hats. Women with starchy faces and thin vermilion lips. Man-shy, suspicious women, shrinking into their clothes every time a wet, caressing eye alights upon them. Women soured and robbed of their souls by Christian Endeavor. Women who would probably be members of the Lake Mohonk Conference if they were men. Gray-haired, middle-aged, waddling women, wrecked and unsexed by endless, useless parturition, nursing, worry, sacrifice. Women who look as if they were still innocent yesterday afternoon. Women in shoes that bend their insteps to preposterous semi-circles. Women with green, barbaric bangles in their ears, like the concubines of Arab horse-thieves. Women looking in show-windows, wishing that their husbands were not such poor sticks. Shapeless women lolling in six thousand dollar motorcars. Trig little blondes, stepping like Shetland ponies. Women smelling of musk, ambergris, bergamot. Long-legged, cadaverous, hungry women. Women eager to be kidnapped, betrayed, forced into marriage at the pistol’s point. Soft, pulpy, pale women. Women with ginger-colored hair and large, irregular freckles. Silly, chattering, gurgling women. Women showing their ankles to policemen, chauffeurs, street-cleaners. Women with slim-shanked, whining, sticky-fingered children dragging after them. Women marching like grenadiers. Yellow women. Women with red hands. Women with asymmetrical eyes. Women with rococo ears. Stoop-shouldered women. Women with huge hips. Bow-legged women. Appetizing women. Good-looking women....

III.—Babies

Babies smelling of camomile tea, cologne water, wet laundry, dog soap, Schmierkase. Babies who appear old, disillusioned and tired of life at six months. Babies that cry "Papa!" to blushing youths of nineteen or twenty at church picnics. Fat babies whose earlobes turn out at an angle of forty-five degrees. Soft, pulpy babies asleep in perambulators, the sun shining straight into their faces. Babies gnawing the tails of synthetic dogs. Babies without necks. Pale, scorbutic babies of the third and fourth generation, damned because their grandfathers and great-grandfathers read Tom Paine. Babies of a bluish tinge, or with vermilion eyes. Babies full of soporifics. Thin, cartilaginous babies that stretch when they are lifted. Warm, damp, miasmatic babies. Affectionate, ingratiating, gurgling babies: the larvæ of life insurance solicitors, fashionable doctors, Episcopal rectors, dealers in Mexican mine stock, hand-shakers, Sunday-school superintendents. Hungry babies, absurdly sucking their thumbs. Babies with heads of thick, coarse black hair, seeming to be toupees. Unbaptized babies, dedicated to the devil. Eugenic babies. Babies that crawl out from under tables and are stepped on. Babies with lintels, grains of corn or shoe-buttons up their noses, purple in the face and waiting for the doctor or the embalmer. A few pink, blue-eyed, tight-skinned, clean-looking babies, smiling upon the world....

XIV.—HOMEOPATHICS
XIV.—Homeopathics

1.
Scene Infernal.

During a lull in the uproar of Hell two voices were heard.

“My name,” said one, “was Ludwig van Beethoven. I was no ordinary musician. The Archduke Rudolph used to speak to me on the streets of Vienna.”

“And mine,” said the other, “was the Archduke Rudolph. I was no ordinary archduke. Ludwig van Beethoven dedicated a trio to me.”

2.
The Eternal Democrat.

A Socialist, carrying a red flag, marched through the gates of Heaven.

“To Hell with rank!” he shouted. “All men are equal here.”

Just then the late Karl Marx turned a corner and came into view, meditatively stroking his whiskers. At once the Socialist fell upon his knees and touched his forehead to the dust.

“O Master!” he cried. “O Master, Master!”

3.
The School of Honor.

A trembling young reporter stood in the presence of an eminent city editor.

“If I write this story,” said the reporter, “it will rob a woman of her good name.”

“If you don’t write it,” said the city editor, “I’ll give you a kick in the pantaloons.”

Next day the young reporter got a raise in salary and the woman swallowed two ounces of permanganate of potassium.

4.
Proposed Plot For a Modern Novel.

Herman was in love with Violet, the wife of Armand, an elderly diabetic. Armand showed three per cent of sugar a day. Herman and Violet, who were Christians, awaited with virtuous patience the termination of Armand’s distressing malady.

One day Dr. Frederick M. Allen discovered his cure for diabetes.

5.
Victory.

“I wooed and won her,” said the Man of His Wife.

“I made him run,” said the Hare of the Hound.

XV.—VERS LIBRE
XV.—Vers Libre

Kiss me on the other eye;
This one’s wearing out.